Spending My Retirement In A Game

Now that Eisen had a pretty good idea about what both of these souls wanted, the old man stood up from the stool that he had placed behind the counter and then made his way into the workshop in the back.

"If you want, you can come and watch, or you can just wait here. You can just leave and come back in a few hours as well, whatever you like, as long as you don’t disturb me as I’m working." With that announcement, Eisen left to get started.

It seemed like the man was feeling pretty curious and chose to directly follow him into the back, where both Bai and the Elemental Spirit were waiting to get started. Of course, the elemental spirit would simply take on the role of an assistant again.

First things first, Eisen made sure that the forge was at the right temperature for this, which it was since it was handled by the Spirit, and then turned his head over to the side to look at just that Spirit, "Get me some high-quality steel and a bit of mythril." The old man said, and the spirit immediately turned around and made its way into the material storage placed directly into the portable shop itself.

There were a lot more specific materials in here, with a lot more different grades and qualities compared to the item storage, where Eisen just had rough types of different materials stored so that he could work whenever he wanted even if he didn’t have space to put down the portable shop.

On the other hand, the item storage just held a lot more different tools and prototypes than the portable shop, so it was kind of balanced-out in that regard.

Soon, the Spirit returned with the materials that Eisen wanted, and Eisen placed the steel into the forge. While it was heating up, he was thinking about what other things to add into it, and had the Spirit get a few different gems as well, which Eisen quickly ground down with Bai’s help.

It seemed like the male soul was rather surprised to see Bai just transform into its multitool form, as Eisen already anticipated, but the man might have been exaggerating a little bit to get the attention of the woman to get her to come inside the workshop as well.

As Eisen really didn’t mind, he just continued with his work. Soon, the steel ingot started to glow in a bright yellow light, so it was about time for Eisen to take it out. He grabbed it with some tongs and placed it up onto the anvil, before watching Bai turn into its hammer form.

With a quick swing, Eisen proceeded to hammer the steel as thinly as he could, before spreading out the ground-down crystals onto it. Eisen found that there were slight differences in the effects of alloying a metal with crystals to just mixing them in like this. While the durability of the item went down a bit if it was done like this, the general effect-potency was a lot better, while there was minimal loss of the natural effects of the gems that Eisen could then later affect through Magic Inscription.

The man seemed like a generally quite careful fighter, and he didn’t seem like someone that liked going for direct hits against other weapons or armor, so it was fine if it didn’t have an amazing base-durability. Obviously it wasn’t brittle like this, so it wasn’t an issue either way. The man seemed like he would take care of his tools and weapons extremely well, and that he was quite attentive when it came to small damages, so Eisen didn’t have any worries in giving him something that needed such attention. Especially here, where items like this probably didn’t break that easily anyway, if it was even possible. They could degrade, but if Eisen was lucky, they couldn’t break.

Either way, the old man simply continued folding the crystal powder into the high-quality steel, folding it multiple times to make sure that the powder was as equally spread out as possible.

And then, the old man split the steel up into two halves, and placed it back into the forge to heat back up while he also finally placed some of the mythril into it. This time, it was actually a rather special mythril. It wasn’t the regular earth-kind that was capable of absorbing impact, and it wasn’t even Eisen’s ’Blazing Core of the Mountain’ version of mythril that was capable of returning absorbed impact.

It was a special kind of Mythril that Eisen has been attempting to create for a while now. Since Silver was already a highly-magical metal without having any mana or element infused into it, it pulled surrounding elements into it very easily and its form was heavily affected by those elements. Water-Mythril would be a liquid, Air-Mythril would be a gas, Fire-Mythril would be basically a metallic flame, while Earth-Mythril was the regular, solid kind you would find. Of course, through this, the only kinds that could easily be used were Water-Mythril, in potions, and Earth-Mythril, in regular items.

Eisen did find a few uses for the Air and Flame Mythrils, like using it the gas-like mythril as a conductor for magic items, or the fire-like mythril in order to actually actively forge items as a replacement for regular flames, and he would actually be using one of these two things later. Although just for a rather small part of the whole process, in the end.

But no, the kind right now was a very special kind of mythril, a kind that had basically completely pure mana infused into it. Eisen was able to do this by creating a special infusion-chamber that was layered and ’cleaned’ with Maroon to get rid of any sort of mana or elemental, ambient magic, and stop it from getting into that chamber at all, and with that was able to create this weird form of mythril that was hard to actually use.

Simply infusing it with pure mana and nothing else basically made it weightless. If it was possible to bring it to the highest step of infusion right now, it might actually end up not having any weight at all, but since it was only enhanced up to a certain point to become Rank 6 mythril, it still had a bit of the weight of silver to it. But it was basically like an air-filled balloon at this point, where it was dropping to the ground very, very slowly.

Besides that, it was hard to properly touch it without causing an indent, as if it was incredibly soft despite not being a liquid. Like some form of foam with a lot of air in it.

When Eisen first created a form of this mythril, when he took it out of the special infusion chamber, it became a different sort of mythril within a few hours, as if it was literally sucking in any sort of ambient elemental magic that it could find.

But once it reached the point of a rank 5 magic material, that aspect of it stopped, as if it reached a certain necessary threshold to be able to exist as its own form of magic material without a specific element imbued into it.

So now, Eisen was able to heat this metal up without worry, as long as he was actually careful. It barely took any time to heat it up, after all.

Once this special mythril was done, Eisen grabbed it with his bare hands and... squished it in them. He was trying to ’compress’ it as much as he possible could in the natural way that you were able to press foam together. Like squishing a hand of loose snow in your hand to make it more ’solid’.

Of course, this surprised the man incredibly, that Eisen was able to simply do that to a piece of metal that was obviously incredibly hot, and even the woman, that had been peeking into the room a little bit, was growing curious.

Noticing their expressions, Eisen turned toward them with a smile, "I’m one half dwarf, and one half giant from the Fire Clan. This kind of thing is nothing to me." The old man explained. He continued to press the metal together in his hands a little and then placed it down onto his anvil. It was a rather small piece now, compared to before, but it was still something that Eisen could work with.

He turned this special mythril into two thin, small sheets, before grabbing the steel out of the forge again as he placed the mythril to the side, and then hammered the two pieces of steel down relatively thinly as well.

Eisen grabbed the mythril sheets and placed them into the center of the flat pieces of steel, before folding the steel over the mythril. The old man continued to hammer down onto this piece of metal with its new, special core, and then started to shape it into two daggers. They were slightly curved, but not all that much. The outside of the curve had a regular edge, while the inside was slightly serrated in case he had to use it for different situations than just fight, and simply to do a lot more damage when directly stabbing someone, although the man still seemed like someone that preferred slashes in his combat.

And now that this was done, Eisen moved onto the next step. He sharpened the edges, as well as the teeth on the serrated side of the daggers, before he got out another special item. It was a small box that was specifically made for smaller items like this.

Eisen opened it up, and all of a sudden, a silver-colored, metallic flame shot out from the top, "Hm, a bit too strong..." The old man muttered, and pushed his mana into the gem at the side of the box. A ’setting screen’ appeared in front of Eisen, and he changed the flame to be a bit lower and more spread out instead of being so strong and focused on one point. And then, the old man placed the two blades of the daggers into the box.

Because right now, the old man was tempering the blades with the help of the Fire-Mythril. Not only would it coat the outside of the daggers in a very, very thin layer of residue of this special type of mythril, but it would also generally enhance the flow of magic of the whole item, even in the parts that were just steel.

This was important to make sure the gem-powder bits were able to work to their full extent. And so, Eisen was close to finishing up the blades like this, and then just quickly started to work on the handles.